August 29, 2015

When Ready for Hillary, a pro-Hillary Rodham Clinton “super PAC,” wanted to take out a million-dollar loan five months before it planned to go out of business, it turned to a bank that was founded to guard the savings of New York City garment workers.

When the Democracy Alliance, an influential club of liberal donors, sought to recruit members in advance of the 2016 elections, the bank’s president helped to make introductions.

And when workers-rights groups wanted to embarrass Walmart and the Gap for unsafe working conditions at factories supplying their stores, Amalgamated Bank, which manages $40 billion in pension fund assets, stepped in again, rounding up fellow investors to warn the companies that they could face lawsuits and shareholder actions.

Four years after nearly collapsing amid the financial crisis, Amalgamated has aggressively carved out a position as the left’s private banker, leveraging deep connections with the Democratic establishment to expand rapidly in a niche long dominated by larger but less nimble financial institutions.

...

Founded and still principally owned by labor unions, the 92-year-old bank has signed up hundreds of new political clients, including most of the Democratic Party’s major committees, the progressive organizations that align with them, and several of their top Senate recruits.

One might worry that this massive political clout might allow the bank an unusual amount of, well, regulatory flexibility. Or, if one is a reporter for the Times, then one would not worry at all.

In the course of explaining that the Republicans do this too "reporter" Nicholas Confessore mentions a bonus wrinkle:

But many Republican candidates and super PACs, including Jeb Bush and the deep-pocketed super PAC supporting him, do the bulk of their banking with their own version of Amalgamated, the smaller Chain Bridge Bank [link], based in McLean, Va. Founded by Peter Fitzgerald, the former Republican senator from Illinois, Chain Bridge broke into political banking amid the 2008 financial crisis when the Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, was looking for a safe place to deposit his war chest. He chose it for its Republican pedigree and low-risk balance sheet.

But unlike competitors, Amalgamated marries its political banking business to $40 billion in trust assets, mostly union pension funds, that it has used to help activist investors who share its ideological bent.

Amalgamated has been a lead plaintiff in several of the largest derivative lawsuits in recent years, including a successful $150 million lawsuit against Duke Energy, one of the largest power companies in the country.

So Amalgamated splashes around union pension fund assets to launch lawsuits backed by Democratic Party activists. I am not so sure Elizabeth Warren had quite this in mind when she called for banking reform, but she is not quoted in the story, so who knows?

Having read about Amalgamated and Chain Bridge, I would say that some of their services do seem to be utterly legit and campaign oriented. This is about Chain Bridge but applies to both:

The bank requires employees to list cell phone numbers on their business cards so clients can reach them after hours. It will greenlight credit cards immediately for campaign staffers scattered across the country without waiting for credit checks, and it will let campaigns make large wire transfers as soon as their accounts are open. It will also send and receive wire transfers until the Federal Reserve window closes, usually around 5 p.m.—more than two hours later than most banks. That extra time can make a difference. “If you’re a presidential campaign and you need to be up on the air in Iowa tonight, then you need your wire to go to television stations in Des Moines this afternoon,” says Peter Fitzgerald, the bank’s founder and chairman. “That’s a big deal for campaigns.”

Both banks have expertise in byzantine campaign finance regulations, so they zip through paperwork that might daunt a competitor. And both are comfortable making loans on the basis of donor pledges and upcoming fund-raising drives, so there are legitimate benefits offered by these banks.

However. Come the day that Amalgamated puts pension fund assets in a company that then catches an unexpected regulatory tailwind from Washington, the Times will undoubtedly be shocked. And if they actually report on it, I will be shocked too.

And come the day that Amalgamated advances funds to a Democratic candidatebased on promised fund-raising that ultimately falls short, well, that is simply a loss on a loan. If shareholders then contribute new capital to cover the loss, that is hardly a campaign contribution, right? In any case the regulators will oversee that fairly, won't they? Please.

August 28, 2015

Coming a day after a Trump speech where he had audience member pull his hair to prove it's his own, Clinton said, "A lot of people have said a lot of things about my hair over the years. So I do kind of know what Donald is going through. And if anyone wonders if mine is real, here's the answer: The hair is real; the color isn't. And come to think of it I wonder if that's true for Donald, too."

Left unmentioned - Trump has his supporters pulling his hair; Hillary's supporters are pulling their own hair:

71 dead in a truck in Hungary, about 150 dead off of Libya - Europe has a refugee/immigrant problem that makes for awful PR, terrible ethical dilemmas, and presents no obvious solution. Let's also note that refugees have rights in Europe, but economic immigrants do not:

Q.Does it matter what you call them?

A. Yes. The terms “migrant” and “refugee” are sometimes used interchangeably, but there is a crucial legal difference between the two.

Q. Who is a refugee?

A. Briefly, a refugee is person who has fled his or her country to escape war or persecution, and can prove it.

The 1951 Refugee Convention, negotiated after World War II, defines a refugee as a person who, “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.”

Among those crossing the Mediterranean in the first half of 2015, the greatest numbers came from Syria, Afghanistan or Eritrea. Syrians are widely presumed to be refugees because of the civil war there, according to the United Nations refugee agency. Many Afghans have been able to make the case that they are fleeing conflict, the agency added, and Eritreans can generally argue that they would face political persecution at home in Eritrea, which is ruled by one of the world’s most repressive regimes.

Q. What does the distinction mean for European countries?

A. Refugees are entitled to basic protections under the 1951 convention and other international agreements. Once in Europe, refugees can apply for political asylum or another protected status, sometimes temporary. By law, refugees cannot be sent back to countries where their lives would be in danger. “One of the most fundamental principles laid down in international law is that refugees should not be expelled or returned to situations where their life and freedom would be under threat,” the refugee agency said in a statement on Thursday.

The NY Times, presumably with the Hillary campaign in the back of their minds (isn't it always?), presents a fascinating article on the decline of vultures in Africa (with a sidetrip to India).

Things I didn't know - poachers poison vultures because circling vultures are a tip-off to savvy game wardens and rangers (or anyone who has read like, one western) that a dying, probably large animal is on the ground beneath them.

The locals don't have a particular problem with vultures, but they poison carcasses in the hope of killing the predators that might otherwise kill their livestock.

And vultures can eat all sorts of diseased and rotting meat because they have highly acidic stomach acids. India has learned the hard way that this prevents the spread of scary diseases:

In 2000, Dr. Virani was dispatched to India, where vultures were dying in great numbers but no one knew why.

“Everywhere I went, there were dead vultures,” he said. “But everywhere, their remains were in good condition.”

The initial hypothesis was that some type of infectious disease was behind the deaths. Soon it became clear that the killer was man-made.

A painkiller widely used to treat livestock was poisoning the birds that fed on their carcasses.

One carcass with the painkiller in its system could poison hundreds of birds, Dr. Virani said, and by 2006, when the painkiller was officially banned, the vulture population had already declined by 97 percent.

Over the same period, there was a drastic rise in cases of rabies in India, with feral dogs taking advantage of the decline in vultures and often spreading the disease to humans.

Dr. Virani described what he called apocalyptic scenes, with hordes of wild dogs numbering in the thousands, scavenging the remains of livestock. Estimates vary, but some put the feral dog population in India now as high as 25 million.

Roughly 36 percent of the world’s rabies deaths — the majority of them children — occur in India, according to the World Health Organization. The battle against the virus is costing the government billions of dollars.

Anyone working on their Zombie Apocalypse screenplay (and who among us is not?) might want to keep vultures and India in mind as Ground Zero.

August 25, 2015

Market tops and market bottoms are fundamentally herd behavior. And while I'm sure that every cow in the herd feels that she is special, just a little bit more insightful than the average cow, collectively they are a bovine mass.

Of course, indexing is a herd strategy too. But it's less of a stampede from some imagined danger, more of an amble toward green pastures. And it works.

Of course, that approach does not allow one to scintillate at cocktail parties, so she may be underestimating the social costs.

The three Americans — Airman First Class Spencer Stone, 23; Alek Skarlatos, 22, a specialist in the Oregon National Guard; and their friend Anthony Sadler, 23 — received the honor in the gilded halls of the Élysée Palace, where they were joined by Chris Norman, 62, a British consultant.

And the kicker:

While only French citizens can be members of the Order of the Legion of Honor, foreigners can receive the medal, which has also been awarded to the novelist Toni Morrison and the actor Clint Eastwood.

“I said to myself, ‘Well, don’t be the guy that just sits there and gets shot’. So I was trying to work out what to do. [The gunman] was at the end of the carriage. I was hiding behind a seat and I was hoping that by doing that he wouldn’t be able to hit me immediately,” he said.

Norman noticed three young American friends leap up. “I heard one of the Americans say ‘Go get him Spence!’, the other one said ‘No you don’t do that, buddy’. I thought great, somebody’s actually intervening, let me stand up because we’ve got much more chance as a team. Let’s go!”

...

Norman said he was “incredibly honoured” to receive the Légion d’honneur, but he felt the Americans had done most of the work.

He said: “My message to people is that if it does happen to you, be aware that there is a possibility to act. Don’t act completely rashly but, when the opportunity arises, for god’s sake jump in there.”

He added: “The thing that stands out is that you can’t wait. If you make a decision, if you see something like that and there is an opportunity, then act.”

“I think the traditional advice that we’ve all grown up with over the last 30 or 40 years is don’t intervene, don’t do those kinds of things. Because I think the ways terrorists once operated was very different. They weren’t killing people to start off with. Whereas here they come in and they’re going to kill you, so you have to think about it differently.”

Asked what he had learned about himself, Norman said: “I always wondered how I would react. Now I know and I don’t want to do it again. It was quite an amazing experience, I don’t want to relive it.”

August 22, 2015

A Just One Daughter wonders what the greatest book to become a move pairing might be? An obvious candidate would be Gone With The Wind, but other book/movies are strong contenders. An example of a non-candidate would be "Casablanca", which was based on a play that no one saw or cares about.

And for the process geeks, one might argue about what metrics could be employed to deliver an "objective" ranking. Clearly this is a question for the FiveThirtyEight crew.

PARIS — The two American service members who tackled a gunman on a high-speed train traveling from Amsterdam to Paris rushed him even though he was fully armed, then grabbed him by the neck and beat him over the head with his own automatic rifle until he was unconscious, one of them said in television interviews here on Saturday.

Researcher Demonstrates How to Suck Carbon from the Air, Make Stuff from It

A novel electrochemical process sequesters carbon in the form of a versatile building material.

So far so cool, and you know this will end up touching on carbon sequestration and climate change.

A new method for taking carbon dioxide directly from the air and converting it to oxygen and nanoscale fibers made of carbon could lead to an inexpensive way to make a valuable building material—and may even serve as a weapon against climate change.

...

The process requires molten lithium carbonate, with another compound, lithium oxide, dissolved in it. The lithium oxide combines with carbon dioxide in the air, forming more lithium carbonate. When voltage is applied across two electrodes immersed in the molten carbonate, the resulting reaction produces oxygen, carbon—which deposits on one of the electrodes—and lithium oxide, which can be used to capture more carbon dioxide and start the process again.

...

As for the technology’s emissions-cutting potential, the researchers are optimistic. They calculate that given an area less than 10 percent of the size of the Sahara Desert, the method could remove enough carbon dioxide to make global atmospheric levels return to preindustrial levels within 10 years, even if we keep emitting the greenhouse gas at a high rate during that period.

Of course this would require a huge increase in demand for carbon nanofibers.

That is a lot of land, but I suspect it is an utterly unrealistic amount of lithium.

LA's scheme to cover a reservoir under 96 million "shade balls" may not be all it is touted to be, experts told FoxNews.com, with some critics going so far as to refer to the plan as a "potential disaster."

The city made national headlines last week when Mayor Eric Garcetti and Department of Water officials dumped $34.5 million worth of the tiny, black plastic balls into the city's 175-acre Van Norman Complex reservoir in the Sylmar section. Garcetti said the balls would create a surface layer that would block 300 million gallons from evaporating amid the state's crippling drought and save taxpayers $250 million.

Experts differed over the best color for the tiny plastic balls, with one telling FoxNews.com they should have been white and another saying a chrome color would be optimal. But all agreed that the worst color for the job is the one LA chose.

"Black spheres resting in the hot sun will form a thermal blanket speeding evaporation as well as providing a huge amount of new surface area for the hot water to breed bacteria," said Matt MacLeod, founder of the California biotech firm Modern Moon Farms. "Disaster. It’s going to be a bacterial nightmare.”

How much of a "bacterial nightmare"? Well, "Fear the Walking Dead", which depicts the start of a zombie outbreak in Los Angeles, premieres Sunday.

A coincidence? Stay tuned...

AND LEST YOU WONDER: Other science types explain the benefits and logic of the black balls, and vigorously dispute the warm water theory:

Black balls will heat up more than white balls would, and might even bump the temperature in the reservoir. They also might not. Sunlight heats an uncovered reservoir, not by directly heating individual water molecules, but by heating the bottom and that heat transferring to water through conduction. The warm, less-dense water on the bottom rises, and fresh, cooler, water sinks down to be heated in turn. In a covered reservoir, sunlight heats the top surface of floating balls instead. Water is still heated by conduction, but it stays at the top instead of circulating. That might slow down heat transfer. But either way, it isn’t very important.

Hmm. I have certainly been swimming on lakes with a warm layer of water extending several feet down and a noticeably cooler layer below that.

August 16, 2015

This is my favorite time of the week. Just enough weekend left to relax. I am assiduously not yet thinking about Monday and work.

It is still the weekend, and I am steadfastly resolved to milk every last minute of it. Sitting and watching the sun go down is a special kind of calm.

ON THE MENU: I'm making fried chicken, mashed potatoes and creamed corn for dinner. Wish you were here.

I just might also have a beer. Yeah, I'll probably have a beer. Ok, I'm definitely gonna have a beer. Maybe two. Ok, I'll definitely have two. Maybe three. I should have three. I might have four. Counting is for losers.

August 15, 2015

Who lost Iraq? Sen. Graham blames Obama. The NY Times and even CNN ( to a lesser extent) agreed, in facts checks after a 2012 Obama-Romney debate, that Obama was scarcely energetic in negotiating a residual US troop presence.

And somewhere, Gen. Petraeus wrote an op-edresponded to written questions noting that Obama's critics are are engaging in speculation and that the prospective benefit of a US residual force was an untested hypothesis. But he seemed to be disappointed.

Some snippets:

You oversaw the gains of the surge in 2007-08. How does it make you feel to see what is happening today, with ISIS having taken over more of Iraq than its predecessor, AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq], ever did?

What has happened in Iraq is a tragedy — for the Iraqi people, for the region and for the entire world. It is tragic foremost because it didn't have to turn out this way. The hard-earned progress of the Surge was sustained for over three years. What transpired after that, starting in late 2011, came about as a result of mistakes and misjudgments whose consequences were predictable. And there is plenty of blame to go around for that.

...

What went wrong?

The proximate cause of Iraq’s unraveling was the increasing authoritarian, sectarian and corrupt conduct of the Iraqi government and its leader after the departure of the last U.S. combat forces in 2011. The actions of the Iraqi prime minister undid the major accomplishment of the Surge. [They] alienated the Iraqi Sunnis and once again created in the Sunni areas fertile fields for the planting of the seeds of extremism, essentially opening the door to the takeover of the Islamic State. Some may contend that all of this was inevitable. Iraq was bound to fail, they will argue, because of the inherently sectarian character of the Iraqi people. I don’t agree with that assessment.

The tragedy is that political leaders failed so badly at delivering what Iraqis clearly wanted — and for that, a great deal of responsibility lies with Prime Minister Maliki.

As for the U.S. role, could all of this have been averted if we had kept 10,000 troops here? I honestly don't know. I certainly wish we could have tested the proposition and kept a substantial force on the ground.

...

Where I think a broader comment is perhaps warranted has to do with the way we came to think about Iraq and, to a certain extent, the broader region over the last few years. There was certainly a sense in Washington that Iraq should be put in our rearview mirror, that whatever happened here was somewhat peripheral to our national security and that we could afford to redirect our attention to more important challenges. Much of this sentiment was very understandable given the enormous cost of our efforts in Iraq and the endless frustrations that our endeavor here encountered.

In retrospect, a similar attitude existed with respect to the civil war in Syria — again, a sense that developments in Syria constituted a horrible tragedy to be sure, but a tragedy at the outset, at least, that did not seem to pose a threat to our national security.

But in hindsight, few, I suspect, would contend that our approach was what it might — or should — have been. In fact, if there is one lesson that I hope we’ve learned from the past few years, it is that there is a linkage between the internal conditions of countries in the Middle East and our own vital security interests.

Well, Petraeus is being diplomatic in saying that "...the way we came to think about Iraq and, to a certain extent, the broader region over the last few years. There was certainly a sense in Washington that Iraq should be put in our rearview mirror...". Obviously, Obama and his progressive supporters felt that way. However, abandoning Iraq in order to prove that the war opponents were right all along was less of a priority for many Republicans.

August 13, 2015

I am surprised that no one moment stood out from the infamous Oct 13 1988 Bush-Dukakis debate. I would guess that it is best remembered for moderator bernard Shaw's question to Mike Dukakis about whether he would rethink his position on the death penalty in the event of a hypothetical rape of his wife. The Duke's answer, paraphrased - I would drown the perpetrator in liberal mush until he knew the meaning of boredom. Oh, let's go to the transcript:

SHAW: For the next 90 minutes we will be questioning the candidates following a format designed and agreed to by representatives of the two campaigns. However, there are no restrictions on the questions that my colleagues and I can ask this evening, and the candidates have no prior knowledge of our questions. By agreement between the candidates, the first question goes to Gov. Dukakis. You have two minutes to respond. Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?

DUKAKIS: No, I don't, Bernard. And I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don't see any evidence that it's a deterrent, and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime. We've done so in my own state. And it's one of the reasons why we have had the biggest drop in crime of any industrial state in America; why we have the lowest murder rate of any industrial state in America. But we have work to do in this nation. We have work to do to fight a real war, not a phony war, against drugs. And that's something I want to lead, something we haven't had over the course of the past many years, even though the Vice President has been at least allegedly in charge of that war. We have much to do to step up that war, to double the number of drug enforcement agents, to fight both here and abroad, to work with our neighbors in this hemisphere. And I want to call a hemispheric summit just as soon after the 20th of January as possible to fight that war. But we also have to deal with drug education prevention here at home. And that's one of the things that I hope I can lead personally as the President of the United States. We've had great success in my own state. And we've reached out to young people and their families and been able to help them by beginning drug education and prevention in the early elementary grades. So we can fight this war, and we can win this war. And we can do so in a way that marshals our forces, that provides real support for state and local law enforcement officers who have not been getting that support, and do it in a way which will bring down violence in this nation, will help our youngsters to stay away from drugs, will stop this avalanche of drugs that's pouring into the country, and will make it possible for our kids and our families to grow up in safe and secure and decent neighborhoods.

SHAW: Mr. Vice President, your one-minute rebuttal.

BUSH: Well, a lot of what this campaign is about, it seems to me Bernie, goes to the question of values. And here I do have, on this particular question, a big difference with my opponent. You see, I do believe that some crimes are so heinous, so brutal, so outrageous, and I'd say particularly those that result in the death of a police officer, for those real brutal crimes, I do believe in the death penalty, and I think it is a deterrent, and I believe we need it. And I'm glad that the Congress moved on this drug bill and have finally called for that related to these narcotics drug kingpins. And so we just have an honest difference of opinion: I support it and he doesn't.

I recall watching that debate with a very liberal friend, who agreed with my assessment about twenty minutes into it - if this were a fight they would stop it. My favorite moment came when the Duke explained that all his heroes were dead, or at least, nameless. While Dukakis spoke, viewers at home could almost literally see George Bush's wheels turning, and he came to the sensible conclusion that heroes ought to have names. The exchange:

COMPTON: Governor, today they may call them role models, but they used to be called heroes, the kind of public figure who could inspire a whole generation, someone who was larger than life. My question is not, who your heroes were. My question instead is, who are the heroes who are there in American life today? Who are the ones who you would point out to young Americans as figures who should inspire this country?

DUKAKIS: Well, I think when I think of heroes, I think back, not presently, Ann. But there are many people who I admire in this country today. Some of them are in public life in the Senate, the Congress. Some of my fellow governors who are real heroes to me. I think of those young athletes who represented us at the Olympics were tremendously impressive. We were proud of them. We felt strongly about them, and they did so well by us. I can think of doctors and scientists, Jonas Salk who for example discovered a vaccine which cured one of the most dread diseases we ever had. And he's a hero. I think of classroom teachers, classroom teachers that I have had, classroom teachers that youngsters have today who are real heroes to our young people. Because they inspire them. They teach them. But more than that, they are role models. Members of the clergy who have done the same. Drug counselors out there in the street who are providing help to youngsters who come up to me and others who ask for help and want help, are doing the hard work, the heroic work, which it takes to provide that kind of leadership, that kind of counseling, that kind of support. I think of people in the law enforcement community who are taking their lives in their hands everyday, when they go up to one of those doors and kick it down and try to stop this flow of drugs into our communities and into our kids. So there are many, many heroes in this country today. These are people that give of themselves everyday and every week and every month. In many cases they are people in the community who are examples, and are role models. And I would hope that one of the things I could do as president is to recognize them, to give them the kind of recognition that they need and deserve so that more and more young people can themselves become the heroes of tomorrow, can go into public service, can go into teaching, can go into drug counseling, can go into law enforcement, and be heroes themselves to generations yet to come.

SHAW: One minute for Vice President Bush.

BUSH: I think of a teacher right here, largely Hispanic school, Jaime Escalante, teaching calculus to young kids, 80 percent of them going on to college. I think of a young man now in this country named Villadaris, who was released from a Cuban jail. Came out and told the truth in this brilliant book, Against All Hope, about what is actually happening in Cuba. I think of those people that took us back into space again, Rick Houk and that crew, as people that are worthy of this. I agree with the Governor on athletics. And there's nothing corny about having sports heroes, young people that are clean and honorable and out there setting the pace. I think of Dr. Fauci. Probably never heard of him. You did, Ann heard of him. He's a very fine research, top doctor, at the National Institute of Health, working hard doing something about research on this disease of AIDS. But look, I also think we ought to give a little credit to the President of the United States. He is the one who has gotten us that first arms control agreement.

SHAW: Mr. Vice President

BUSH: And the cynics abounded. And he is leaving office with a popularity at an all-time high, because American people

The two men differed in style throughout the encounter. Mr. Dukakis, widely rated in the first debate as lacking warmth, sought a more relaxed appearance, and smiled frequently. But when he was asked to list those whom American children should regard as heroes, Mr. Dukakis seemed taken aback and listed general categories of people: doctors and scientists, classroom teachers, policemen and scientists.

Mr. Bush, who answered the question second and had more time to consider his response, replied quickly with the names of Jaime Escalante, the Hispanic educator; Frederick H. Hauck, the commanderr of the space shuttle Discovery, and Armando Valladeres, a Cuban released from a Communist prison who wrote of his experiences.

And a last bit of nostalgia - when the debate ended Dukakis fled the stage as if a skunk had wandered onto it, while Bush hung around to shake hands. As the reporters watched the scene one of them said, roughly, it is not really our job to declare winners and losers here but I will say that after a big football game you generally see the winning team celebrating on the field and the losers head to the locker room.

Since that debate I have never noticed any candidate ever scampering off-stage afterwards, so score one for the consultants.

AND ONE LAST THING: Among the Ten Worst moments is Bush 41's gaffe in looking at his watch during a 1992 debate. But I find the epilogue interesting: in the 2000 Cheney-Lieberman Vice Presidential debate, Cheney mentioned to Lieberman (2:00 min mark) that he had not worn his watch. I have a strong recollection of Bush 43 making the same point after one of his debate appearances, but Google is not helping me out here.

I CAN QUIT ANYTIME: The 2000 Presidential debates gave us The Three Faces of Al - we got hyperaggressive Testosterone Al, medicated Thorazine Al, and finally, "Real Al". Oddly, not quite enough voters were interested in electing three President in one. And Gore's sighs made this list of debate gaffes.

August 12, 2015

The most important thing to understand about the continuing scandal over Hillary Clinton’s exclusive use of a private email server while serving as the Secretary of State is that almost everything she has claimed about the matter has turned out to be not true.

I wonder. Her utter lack of candor may hurt her with the public, but the fact that this has turned into a criminal investigation may hurt her more.Then again, she may hope to hide everything behind grand jury secrecy and run out the clock until November 2016.

I suppose someone somewhere hoped that the Clinton-related allegations and insinuations would not begin until after her coronation. Instead, we have a running start on her "Back to the 90's!" campaign.

FREQUENTLY UNASKED QUESTIONS: Can Hillary be impeached now or do we have to elect her first? Think about that - first woman President, first husband and wife Presidents, first husband and wife impeached Presidents. Those are records that will never be broken.

SOUNDING LIKE A BROKEN RECORD... Have I never mentioned this old story? I was listening to Phil Rizzuto in his broadcast days and he was asked to pick a record that would never be broken. "Don Larsen's perfect World Series game" he promptly replied. Bill White "hmmed" and noted that someone might come along someday and pitch another such perfect game. To which the Scooter replied, "That would tie the record!".

So yes, if Hillary and Bill become the First Impeached Couple, that record won't be broken.

The Ties has several pieces on the Middle East maneuverings of our Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and his Laureate-in-Waiting. Let's start with the bad news:

New Diplomacy Seen on U.S.-Russian Efforts to End Syrian Civil War

BEIRUT, Lebanon — With President Bashar al-Assad of Syria facing battlefield setbacks, diplomats from Russia, the United States and several Middle Eastern powers are engaged in a burst of diplomatic activity, trying to head off a deeper collapse of the country that could further strengthen the militant group Islamic State.

The Russians seem to be driving this:

Russia has played the most prominent public role so far in the new diplomacy. Some analysts say that the discussion reflects a softening of the Obama administration’s long-held position that “Assad must go,” and a fear, shared with Russia, that the Islamic State could be the primary beneficiary if Mr. Assad’s government continues to weaken, as they expect, or even to collapse entirely, which they view as less likely but increasingly possible.

...

Mr. Assad’s opponents, too, have reason to reassess strategy; American efforts to build a proxy force in Syria have largely failed, insurgent groups have their own attrition problems, and Saudi Arabia and Turkey face political and security blowback at home.

As the military situation continues to deteriorate, the major powers are growing increasingly nervous. Emile Hokayem, a Middle East analyst with the International Institute for Strategic Studies and a vociferous critic of Mr. Assad, said the United States was letting Russia take the lead because “they don’t want to own this.” If anything, Mr. Hokayem added, “it’s the United States that has moved closer to Russia’s position” that Mr. Assad could be part of the transitional government that is the stated goal of any negotiations.

Our only reassurance is that both Obama and Kerry are three-dimensional geniuses. Obama didn't want to arm the moderate rebels a few years ago when there may have been some, he mocked ISIS as the "junior varsity", he drew red lines in Syria he wouldn't enforce, he insisted there was no linkage between Putin's adventurism in the Ukraine and the getting Putin to help with the debacle in Syria, and now he is flipping the keys to... Putin. Geez, if only Hillary were still at State to reset the reset with Russia.

Well, on to the worse news. Set aside my lost confidence in team Obama and let's hear from the NY Times editorial board:

Who Threatens America Most?

In what order does the Obama administration rank the biggest external threats to America’s national security? The short answer: It depends on whom and which agency you ask.

Official opinion is all over the lot, a sign of a rapidly changing world, different bureaucratic priorities and confused thinking. Which raises this question: If officials cannot agree on what the most pressing threats are, how can they develop the right strategies and properly allocate resources?

i have lost my confidence and they have lost their pom-poms. Scary!

And as an illustration of the complexities and subtleties vexing our nuanced leadership, the Times explains why Turkey announced greater cooperation with the US against ISIS and then promptly attacked the only group in Syria that seems to be able to work with the US to battle ISIS.

It has been obvious for years that the Kurds intended to carve out an enclave bordering Turkey in Iraq and, since opportunity has knocked, Syria. It has also been obvious that the Turks were choking on this. One might have hoped that our new arrangement with Turkey would have addressed this, but apparently not.

August 10, 2015

There was remarkably little economic discussion at the debate, although Jeb Bush is still boasting about his record in Florida — that is, his experience in presiding over a gigantic housing bubble, and providentially leaving office before the bubble burst [Sort of like Bill, Hillary and the tech bubble of the 90's, but let's move on - TM]. Why didn’t the other candidates say more? Probably because at this point the Obama economy doesn’t look too bad. Put it this way: if you compare unemployment rates over the course of the Obama administration with unemployment rates under Reagan, Mr. Obama ends up looking better – unemployment was higher when he took office, and it’s now lower than it was at this point under Reagan.

I know what you're thinking, but hold that thought and don't go researching figures depicting the level of underemployment just yet. The Earnest Prof continues:

O.K., there are many reasons to qualify that assessment, notably the fact that measured unemployment is low in part because of a decline in the percentage of Americans in the labor force. Still, the Obama economy has utterly failed to deliver the disasters — hyperinflation! a plunging dollar! fiscal crisis! — that just about everyone on the right predicted. And this has evidently left the Republican presidential field with nothing much to say.

And his Big Finish:

I’m not saying that America is in great shape, because it isn’t. Economic recovery has come too slowly, and is still incomplete; Obamacare isn’t the system anyone would have designed from scratch; and we’re nowhere close to doing enough on climate change. But we’re doing far better than any of those guys in Cleveland will ever admit.

August 09, 2015

The NY Times essays a major survey of the Hillary email scandal. They offer plenty of winks, nods and reassurances for their Upper West side readers but can't elide the point that with this email problem, there is a there here. We do get a new (to me, anyway) rationalization for her decision to get a private server, but also a description of several instances where the Obama Administation took a hard line on people who were careless with classified info.

Hillary Clinton Emails Take Long Path to Controversy

Yeah, unraveling a cover-up's a bitch, especially when the Legacy Media has to be dragged kicking and screaming to it.

...

Whether Americans believe Mrs. Clinton’s decision to use only a private email account for her public business is a troubling scandal well worth an F.B.I. inquiry, a pragmatic move blown out of proportion by Republican enemies, or something in between, may depend more on their partisan leanings than the facts of the affair itself.

Facts won't matter. Sadly, they are probably right - reality won't be allowed to interfere with the coronation of the boss's wife.

Mrs. Clinton, who has said she now regrets her unorthodox decision to keep private control of her official messages, is not a target in the F.B.I.’s investigation, which is focused on assessing security breaches. Against the backdrop of other current government computer security lapses, notably the large-scale theft of files from the Office of Personnel Management, most specialists believe the occasional appearance of classified information in the Clinton account was probably of marginal consequence.

But exempting herself from the practices imposed on the 24,000 Foreign Service officers and Civil Service workers she oversaw has led to resentment from some former subordinates. And by holding onto the official emails until the State Department was prompted by Congress to ask for them, and then deciding for herself which to preserve, Mrs. Clinton may have provoked mistrust even as she asks American voters to send her to the Oval Office.

The Clinton campaign declined to comment for this article.

Not everyone agrees that all these tedious rules and regulations regarding document preservation and the security of classified information are just partisan smoke:

Others say more than politics is at stake. “I was stunned to see that she didn’t use the State Department system for State Department business, as we were always told we had to do,” said William Johnson, a former Air Force officer who served at the department from 1999 to 2011.

Mr. Johnson said his concerns were only compounded by the discovery of classified information in the emails. “If I’d done that, I’d be out on bond right now,” he said. He said he believed that someone should be punished — if not Mrs. Clinton, then career employees whose job was to safeguard secrets and preserve public records.

“It’s not the end of the world; she didn’t give away the crown jewels,” Mr. Johnson said. “But this is not how things are supposed to be done.”

The Times breaks the story into three phases - her decision to use a private server, her personal discretion as to which emails were public and which could be destroyed as private, and the discovery of classified information on her non-government servers. Some highlights:

Mrs. Clinton has said she decided in 2009 to handle all her email, official and personal, on one account to avoid carrying multiple electronic devices. Yet early this year she joked that she was “two steps short of a hoarder. So I have an iPad, a mini iPad, an iPhone and a BlackBerry.”

So there may have been other reasons for using a private server. For an oft-attacked politician considering a presidential run, the server would give Mrs. Clinton some control over what would become public from her four years as the nation’s top diplomat. “I’ve been following it very carefully,” said Shiva Ayyadurai, an email pioneer who has designed email systems for both government and large corporations. A private system, he noted, “would make it possible to decide what would be disclosed and what would not.”

No kidding. The notion that she wanted protection from Congress, the media (by way of the FOIA) and Team Obama has been discussed. But I have not seen this next rationale before:

There is another factor that some former colleagues say puts Mrs. Clinton’s decision in a more reasonable light: the archaic, dysfunctional computer systems at the State Department. Only a tiny fraction of emails sent on the State.gov system in recent years have been permanently archived. And former State Department employees describe the unclassified email system in 2009 as frustratingly inadequate.

Using State Department email outside the building involved “incredibly unreliable software,” said one former senior official. “If you had to write a priority message that was more than a paragraph long, it could leave you streaming sweat and screaming at the screen. And that’s when people would turn to their private accounts out of desperation.”

Another official described landing in foreign capitals late at night and having to go to the American Embassy and wake people up simply to check his unclassified email. He called the situation “ludicrous,” though he said the system slowly improved, especially as more people got government BlackBerry devices.

At least Team Hillary is improving their spin, a bit anyway. Why this archaic system was tolerated by past Secretaries of State, not to mention most of Hillary's poor colleagues, is left unexamined.

On to "The Deletion"

...

After meeting with two of her closest aides, Ms. Mills and Philippe Reines, State Department officials decided last year to ask for any emails in the custody of Mrs. Clinton — and of her three predecessors as secretary of state, who said they had none. She turned over 30,490 emails last December, nearly two years after leaving office.

But it turned out that she had destroyed a slightly larger number of messages from her account — 31,830 — because she or her aides judged them to be personal in nature.

“At the end, I chose not to keep my private, personal emails,” she told reporters in March. “Emails about planning Chelsea’s wedding or my mother’s funeral arrangements. Condolence notes to friends, as well as yoga routines, family vacations — the other things you typically find in inboxes. No one wants their personal emails made public.”

That explanation might win public sympathy. But it did not take long for evidence to surface that the culling may have included some work-related emails as well.

In June, the State Department said that it had not been able to find in Mrs. Clinton’s emails some 15 messages from Sidney Blumenthal, an old friend and aide, who had independently turned them over to the House Benghazi committee. The messages involved Libya — Mr. Blumenthal was passing along analysis from a former C.I.A. officer — and they appeared to involve policy.

The Clinton campaign has not explained the discrepancy. In sorting through more than 60,000 emails, it is easy to imagine slip-ups. But this small window on the deletion process, carried out privately by Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers and aides, offered little assurance to skeptics that the work email collection was complete.

Hey, maybe Hillary had 10,000 emails from Sydney Blumenthal, the vast majority of which involved personal trivia, so the deletion of the rare work-related email was totally innocent. Yeah, that's the ticket!

The Times finally covers "Classified". After reviewing the inspector general's preliminary finding the Times adds this:

In the case of Mrs. Clinton’s email, the F.B.I. is conducting an investigation of just how the classified material was stored in Denver, as well as on a thumb drive kept by her lawyer, Mr. Kendall, and whether it might somehow have landed in the hands of adversaries. Officials say the bureau at this point has no target in mind and no evidence that a crime was committed.

But the investigation takes place in an administration that has taken an especially hard line on the handling of classified information.

Scott Gration, ambassador to Kenya, resigned after a 2012 inspector general’s report accused him of flouting government rules, including the requirement that he use State Department email. “He has willfully disregarded Department regulations on the use of commercial email for official government business,” the report said. [But the email thing was a minor point, says PolitFact, with a link to the IG report.]

A New York firefighter and decorated combat veteran who served in the Marines in Afghanistan, Jason Brezler, is currently fighting dismissal from the Marine Corps for sending, via his personal account, an email attachment the government says was classified [background here]. His lawyer, Kevin Carroll, says he sent the message in response to an emergency request from a base in Afghanistan.

Mrs. Clinton and her aides have noted that the material the inspectors general call classified was not labeled as such in the emails. But in 2010, Thomas Drake, a former senior National Security Agency official, was indicted under the Espionage Act for keeping an agency email printout at home that was not marked as classified. (Mr. Drake pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.)

J. William Leonard, a former director of the government’s Information Security Oversight Office, said that in Mrs. Clinton’s case, criminal charges like those against Mr. Drake are highly unlikely. But as a former security official, he said, he was dismayed by her exclusive use of private email. The State Department has an obligation to monitor unclassified email for exactly this kind of classified spillage, he said, as well as to protect computer systems and provide emails to Congress or the public when required by law.

“The agency can’t fulfill those legal responsibilities if it doesn’t have control over the server,” Mr. Leonard said.

WASHINGTON — When President Obama addresses the nation on Wednesday to explain his plan to defeat Islamic extremists in Iraq and Syria, it is a fair bet he will not call them the “JV team.”

Nor does he seem likely to describe Iraq as “sovereign, stable and self-reliant” with a “representative government.” And presumably he will not assert after more than a decade of conflict that “the tide of war is receding.”

As he seeks to rally Americans behind a new military campaign in the Middle East, Mr. Obama finds his own past statements coming back to haunt him. Time and again, he has expressed assessments of the world that in the harsh glare of hindsight look out of kilter with the changed reality he now confronts.

But now the topic du jour has moved from the Middle East to Iran, so its all good. Really?

August 07, 2015

Eating spicy food is associated with a reduced risk for death, an analysis of dietary data on more than 485,000 people found.

Study participants were enrolled between 2004 and 2008 in a large Chinese health study, and researchers followed them for an average of more than seven years, recording 20,224 deaths. The study is in BMJ.

After controlling for family medical history, age, education, diabetes, smoking and many other variables, the researchers found that compared with eating hot food, mainly chili peppers, less than once a week, having it once or twice a week resulted in a 10 percent reduced overall risk for death. Consuming spicy food six to seven times a week reduced the risk by 14 percent.

I would also wonder as to value of the statistical controls. My impression is that a diet high in spicy food is generally a cultural thing - just off-hand, a diet high in spicy food is probably common in Mexico and much less so in Ireland. So I wonder whether, despite their efforts to control for variables such as age, weight, smoking status and so on, the researchers were simply looking at different cultural groups with notably different (but not obviously measurable) lifestyle differences.

Or perhaps the spicy food aficianados are outliers within their own cultural group and are confounding the statisticians with many other unmeasurable behaviors outside of the mainstream. For example, think "Crossfitters" with their intense exercise and Paleo diets. But remember - the Paleo diet is not just for Crossfitters, it's for everyone! Even Jeb Bush, who does not appear to be hitting the heavy iron. Unlike his bro.

Interesting - given what Biden and Obama were saying about Iraq prior to the 2011 US troop withdrawal and the 2012 election, one might well pin two of those defeats on Obama.

The purpose of war, military or economic, is to get your enemy to do something it would rather not do. Over the past several years the United States and other Western powers have engaged in an economic, clandestine and political war against Iran to force it to give up its nuclear program.

Over the course of this siege, American policy makers have been very explicit about their goals. Foremost, to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Second, as John Kerry has said, to force it to dismantle a large part of its nuclear infrastructure. Third, to take away its power to enrich uranium.

Mr. Brooks continues to enumerate the administration's stated goals, but we all know where this is headed:

As a report from the Foreign Policy Initiative exhaustively details, the U.S. has not fully achieved any of these objectives. The agreement delays but does not end Iran’s nuclear program. It legitimizes Iran’s status as a nuclear state. Iran will mothball some of its centrifuges, but it will not dismantle or close any of its nuclear facilities. Nuclear research and development will continue.

Iran wins the right to enrich uranium. The agreement does not include “anywhere, anytime” inspections; some inspections would require a 24-day waiting period, giving the Iranians plenty of time to clean things up. After eight years, all restrictions on ballistic missiles are lifted. Sanctions are lifted once Iran has taken its initial actions.

And what does it mean?

Wars, military or economic, are measured by whether you achieved your stated objectives. By this standard the U.S. and its allies lost the war against Iran, but we were able to negotiate terms that gave only our partial surrender, which forces Iran to at least delay its victory. There have now been three big U.S. strategic defeats over the past several decades: Vietnam, Iraq and now Iran.

The big question is, Why did we lose? Why did the combined powers of the Western world lose to a ragtag regime with a crippled economy and without much popular support?

The first big answer is that the Iranians just wanted victory more than we did. They were willing to withstand the kind of punishment we were prepared to mete out.

Further, the Iranians were confident in their power, while the Obama administration emphasized the limits of America’s ability to influence other nations. It’s striking how little President Obama thought of the tools at his disposal. He effectively took the military option off the table. He didn’t believe much in economic sanctions. “Nothing we know about the Iranian government suggests that it would simply capitulate under that kind of pressure,” he argued.

The president concluded early on that Iran would simply not budge on fundamental things. As he argued in his highhanded and counterproductive speech Wednesday, Iran was never going to compromise its sovereignty (which is the whole point of military or economic warfare).

And to be fair:

The president hoped that a deal would change the moral nature of the regime, so he had an extra incentive to reach a deal. And the Western, Russian and Chinese sanctions regime was fragile while the Iranians were able to hang together.

Under Obama the US was never going to play the military card. The Russians and Chinese, not to mention the Euros, are not enthusiastically united behind the economic card. In short, Obama was not playing with a full deck.

This administration has given us a choice between two terrible options: accept the partial-surrender agreement that was negotiated or reject it and slide immediately into what is in effect our total surrender — a collapsed sanctions regime and a booming Iranian nuclear program.

Many members of Congress will be tempted to accept the terms of our partial surrender as the least bad option in the wake of our defeat. I get that. But in voting for this deal they may be affixing their names to an arrangement that will increase the chance of more comprehensive war further down the road.

Iran is a fanatical, hegemonic, hate-filled regime. If you think its radicalism is going to be softened by a few global trade opportunities, you really haven’t been paying attention to the Middle East over the past four decades.

Now maybe it is Mr. Brooks who has not been paying attention - some Iranian women bought Nick Kristof's kids some ice cream, so peace is at hand.

With all that said, the political motivation behind Obama's offensive and absurd linkage of Iranian hardliners and his Republican opponents is obvious - Obama can't make a calm, reasoned case for this deal but if he can instigate a partisan food fight both sides will hustle to their own barricades and he will have veto-proof minorities in both chambers.

BONUS THOUGHT: Mr. Hope and Change circa 2008 has now taken to rallying his base by means of ongoing gender and ethnic incitement and partisan name-calling. Does he imagine himself to be making common cause with the "Death to America" crowd in Iran, who no doubt need their own home-grown agita to rouse their base and prop up their power?

So: While Iran tests the limits of the deal — rubbing Obama’s face in the weakness of his enforcement position — he turns his anger on critics of the deal.

What to make of this strategy?

First, exercising the rhetorical version of the nuclear option has an obvious political benefit. It is now evident that the Obama administration reached its agreement in a march of ever-more humiliating concessions: on anytime, anywhere inspections, on accounting for past nuclear activities, on lifting the conventional arms embargo. Better to have a referendum on the Iraq war than serious congressional scrutiny of the embarrassing manner in which the Iran agreement was secured.

If Obama can make support for the deal a partisan, ideological cause, he can bring along enough liberals in Congress to save it. So break out the Iraq comparisons. Adopting the tone, language and reasoning of your average MSNBC panelist has some cost to the institution of the presidency. But in the age of Donald Trump, who will notice?

This rhetorical strategy, by the way, is not directed just at Republicans. Obama won the presidency by attacking Hillary Clinton from the left for her vote in favor of the Iraq war. Now he is reminding moderate Democrats in Congress: The liberal base will not be happy if you defy me.

Obama really does need to remind people about one of his rare moments of insight in the Middle East, back when he opposed stupid wars (e.g., Europe in 1941 but almost surely not 1939). Referendums on the Bush surge in Iraq, pulling our troops from Iraq in 2011, ISIS as the "junior varsity", arming the Syrian rebels, drawing and erasing red lines in Syria, or overthrowing Qadaffi and causing a quagmire in Libya might not go so well.

WASHINGTON — When President Obama addresses the nation on Wednesday to explain his plan to defeat Islamic extremists in Iraq and Syria, it is a fair bet he will not call them the “JV team.”

Nor does he seem likely to describe Iraq as “sovereign, stable and self-reliant” with a “representative government.” And presumably he will not assert after more than a decade of conflict that “the tide of war is receding.”

As he seeks to rally Americans behind a new military campaign in the Middle East, Mr. Obama finds his own past statements coming back to haunt him. Time and again, he has expressed assessments of the world that in the harsh glare of hindsight look out of kilter with the changed reality he now confronts.

August 05, 2015

A federal judge has ordered Hillary Clinton and two of her top aides to provide more details about their email arrangement to a court while under penalty of perjury.

In a lawsuit against the State Department that was reopened following news of Clinton's private email server, Judge Emmet Sullivan of U.S. District Court ordered Clinton, Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin to declare under oath that they have produced all government-related records in their possession.

Sullivan also ordered Clinton, Mills and Abedin to identify the email server and any devices they may have used to transmit government records, and to confirm whether Abedin and Mills had access to the private network Clinton reportedly set up in her own home.

The FBI has begun looking into the security of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private e-mail setup, contacting in the past week a Denver-based technology firm that helped manage the unusual system, according to two government officials.

Also last week, the FBI contacted Clinton’s lawyer, David Ken­dall, with questions about the security of a thumb drive in his possession that contains copies of work e-mails Clinton sent during her time as secretary of state.

Hillary Clinton's attorney has been allowed to keep emails now known to be classified, but the inspector general of the intelligence community was denied access to the same emails upon request, a State Department spokesman said Wednesday.

"The counsel for former Secretary Clinton advised the department at the time that [the cache of emails] was subject to a separate document request" from the House Select Committee on Benghazi, said Mark Toner, State Department spokesman.

Toner said the intelligence community inspector general's request was denied on "jurisdictional" grounds.

The intelligence watchdog raised concerns about the classified information that was transmitted on Clinton's server last month after discovering four classified emails among a sample of 40.

It was Iowahawk who quipped:

Starting to think the only reason Hillary's running is to avoid indictment.

And speaking of things we learned today, I did not know this: David Kendall, Hillary's lawyer with the thumb drive of her emails, was also David Petreaus's lawyer when he pled guilty to mishandling classified documents.

August 04, 2015

Fox is hosting the GOP debate Thursday night. Or debates, really, with the top 10 candidates in the polls getting into the prime time slot at 9 PM EST, and the rest on at the 5 PM "kiddie table" debate.

Fox will determine the top 10 based upon the five most recent national polls at 5 PM today. There is very little chance that any polls released between now and 5 PM will change the current standings:

The first debate of the presidential election season. I don't know the last time I was this excited. Maybe when I found that quarter lying in the parking lot this morning on my way into work. That was pretty awesome.

August 03, 2015

Republican politicians stink. This is because real Republicans don’t go into politics. We have a life. We have families, jobs, responsibilities, and it takes all our time and energy to avoid them and go play golf.

The Times explains that the ascendance of The Donald has made it difficult for the many unknowns in the Republican Presidential field to break through Trumps deafening noise. However, they also quote a "Republican strategist" (favorite food - jumbo shrimp) who may not be getting a bonus for his choice of metaphor:

Jeb Bush’s Camp Sees an Upside to Donald Trump’s Surge in the G.O.P.

WASHINGTON — It may be the Summer of Trump, but the publicity-hungry real estate magnate is not the only Republican presidential candidate relishing all his attention.

Donald J. Trump’s surge in the polls has been met with barely concealed delight by Jeb Bush and his supporters. Mr. Trump’s bombastic ways have simultaneously made it all but impossible for those vying to be the alternative to Mr. Bush to emerge, and easier for Mr. Bush, the former Florida governor, to position himself as the serious and thoughtful alternative to a candidate who has upended the early nominating process.

With little indication that his support is slipping and the promise of the center stage at Thursday’s debate, Mr. Trump has essentially frozen the rest of the field.

OK, but...

“The longer it goes, the greater the panic is going to build,” said Alex Castellanos, a longtime Republican strategist. “And that means you may not have the luxury to flirt with an undeveloped, budding candidate. Trump has set the Republican Party on fire, and if you’re going to put that fire out you don’t have time to waste. You’re going to have to grab the biggest blanket you got and throw it, and right now that’s Jeb.”

I think there is widespread agreement within the JOM community that if Republican leaders are hoping to rally the base then Jeb Bush is about the biggest wet blanket the Republicans could find.

August 01, 2015

The NY Times describes a puzzle that is apparently baffling the strategists in the Obama 'administration' - why does Al Qaeda hate us?

Rivals of ISIS Attack U.S.-Backed Syrian Rebel Group

BAGHDAD — A Syrian insurgent group at the heart of the Pentagon’s effort to fight the Islamic State came under intense attack on Friday from a different hard-line Islamist faction, a serious blow to the Obama administration’s plans to create a reliable military force inside Syria.

...

The attack on Friday was mounted by the Nusra Front, which is affiliated with Al Qaeda. It came a day after the Nusra Front captured two leaders and at least six fighters of Division 30, which supplied the first trainees to graduate from the Pentagon’s anti-Islamic State training program.

In Washington, several current and former senior administration officials acknowledged that the attack and the abductions by the Nusra Front took American officials by surprise and amounted to a significant intelligence failure.

They did not see this coming?

While American military trainers had gone to great lengths to protect the initial group of trainees from attacks by Islamic State or Syrian Army forces, they did not anticipate an assault from the Nusra Front. In fact, officials said on Friday, they expected the Nusra Front to welcome Division 30 as an ally in its fight against the Islamic State.

The Nusra Front was going to be keen to embrace a US backed group as an ally? Maybe Division 30 is being commanded from Area 51, because under our our boring yellow sun a bit of history noted by the Times seems relevant:

The Nusra Front said in a statement on Friday that its aim was to eliminate Division 30 before it could gain a deeper foothold in Syria. The Nusra Front did much the same last year when it smashed the main groups that had been trained and equipped in a different American effort, one run covertly by the C.I.A.

This is tricky and I am not a highly-paid national security officer with access to the latest intel, but it occurs to me that Al Qaeda declared the US to be the "far enemy" back in the 90's. Since then, we have fought Al Qaeda and its offshoots in Afghanistan and Pakistan, (and still do), Iraq (yeah, yeah, after Bush invaded), Yemen, Somalia, and really, anywhere we can find them.

Yet for some reason the Qaeda affiliate in Syria was expected to welcome, or at least tolerate a US-backed group, despite a recent history suggesting the opposite?

I fear that the decriminalization of marijuana in Washington DC has had greater impact then expected.

IF YOU'RE NOT AGAINST ASSAD YOU ARE WITH HIM: Thomas Joscelyn at The Long War Journal has a different take.